Al Maliki Stands Off Against the Antichrist

The New Standoff in Baghdad

Standoff Between al-Maliki and al-Sadr

Violent Sunni rebels, a major humanitarian crisis and now a political crisis, too, as the old prime minister won’t leave office

 

Author: Jeff Neumann

Posted: 08/12/14 09:22 EDT

Things aren’t looking much better today in Iraq. Though thousands of Yazidis—the long-persecuted religious sect that jihadi fighters are currently hunting down—have managed to escape from the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, many of them are now simply wandering through the desert starving and dying of thirst.

So desperate are conditions on the mountain that one man was forced to leave behind his 95-year-old mother in order to survive. “I left my mother behind on the mountain in a cave. She said, ‘I want to stay here. Go, save yourselves,’” he told a Reuters reporter. And each horrifying story seems to be outdone by another. More from the scene:

“When we went up the mountain, the [Islamic State] snipers were firing at us. The girls were throwing themselves off the top of the mountain,” said Khalaf Hajji, who worked at a school. “We have lost all our faith in Iraq. They have hundreds of our women.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to air-drop supplies to Mount Sinjar and the surrounding desert, and launch air strikes to relieve the besieged mountain and Kurdish towns that have been overrun by militants from the Islamic State, commonly called ISIS. Whether airpower alone can help stop the well-armed jihadi assault, no one knows for sure. But CIA-supplied weapons, now in the hands of Kurdish fighters, seem to be helping significantly in pushing back the militants.

Further south of the new border that ISIS effectively drew across Iraq in early June, a political crisis in Baghdad has turned into a heavily armed round of gamesmanship. Despite his term being over, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doesn’t want to leave office and feels he should have a third term. So like any respectable strongman, he ordered special forces and Shiite militias loyal to him to surround his fortress-like compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone with American-supplied tanks.

One of Maliki’s biggest problems was his unwillingness to abandon sectarian policies and rebuild an inclusive Iraq. To that end, Iraqi parliamentarians went ahead on Monday and elected a new prime minister, Haidar al-Abadi, one of Maliki’s old allies, and a man apparently respected by many members of Iraq’s three main powerbroker sects: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Members of Maliki’s own Dawa political party are abandoning him, too. Meanwhile, one of his old antagonists, the powerful Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, voiced his support for Abadi as the new prime minister. Even Maliki’s old allies in Iran, where he once hid from Saddam Hussein, want the man gone.

Despite having effectively installed him, the White House has been tired of Maliki’s game for some time, and now administration officials are stepping up the verbal attacks and the pressure to force him out peacefully. “There should be no use of force, no introduction of troops or militias in this moment of democracy for Iraq,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters yesterday. “The government formation process is critical in terms of sustaining stability and calm in Iraq, and our hope is that Mr. Maliki will not stir those waters.”

By “stir those waters,” Kerry is essentially asking Maliki to refrain from trying to pull the old dictator trick of lighting the house on fire on his way out the door.

Speaking from Australia on Tuesday morning, Kerry put even more pressure on Baghdad to form a new government without Maliki at the helm. “We are prepared to consider additional political, military and security options as Iraq starts to build a new government,” Kerry said. Could this mean expanded U.S. air strikes to relieve Iraqi troops and Shiite militias who are fighting jihadis just 40 miles from Baghdad? Iraqi politicians and military men sure hope so.

If you’ve got a bit of time, read this profile of Maliki from February in The New Yorker. It’s the best one out there and offers a rare window into the man’s backstory. It’s food for thought as Iraqis and the international community wait for his next move.